News

On Feb. 15, just days after massive layoffs at Activision Blizzard, the AFL-CIO issued a powerful public statement of support to game developers in the United States. Its message, published in an open letter at Kotaku, was both simple and profound.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the nation’s labor movement has come to a conclusion about President Donald Trump’s latest U.S. Supreme Court nominee: “Workers are united to defeat Kavanaugh,” he declares.

His statement was part of a much longer July 12 speech behind closed doors to Democratic U.S. House candidates. While Trumka did not cite specific cases and rulings, the federation previously compiled a string of anti-worker decisions and statements by federal appellate judge Brett Kavanaugh in his dozen years on the bench.

Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, who was the Nobel laureate in economics in 2001, spoke at a talk on Monday with Damon Silvers, the director of policy and special counsel at the AFL-CIO, part of a day-long strategy session on “Bargaining for the Common Good in the World of Global Finance” held by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung office in New York, a non-profit political German foundation.

House Democratic candidates in town this week for training at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington got a visit from AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka for some tips on how they can win back working-class voters.

“I don’t have to tell you that you can’t count on the D next to your name to gain our support,” Trumka told Democratic leadership and a room full of candidates on Red to Blue, the DCCC’s program for its strongest candidates.

In the belly of the political beast in DC, grassroots organizers gathered at AFL-CIO headquarters to discuss collective action under Trump, beyond the beltway. Activists representing teachers, housekeepers, graduate students, and airline workers talked about union power in the wake of the Janus decision and keeping hope alive for the next generation of young labor leaders.

Their membership has been declining for decades. They’ve been bedeviled by crippling new laws, and by a devastating U.S. Supreme Court decision just this week. From all appearances, it would seem that labor unions are an endangered species.

But here’s the surprise: Organized labor is showing new signs of life.

In Janus v. AFSCME, the US Supreme Court's conservative 5-4 majority held that public employees cannot be required by state law to pay a fair share of the cost of services that unions must provide members and nonmembers alike.

Janus comes a month after Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, where the same majority decided employees can be required by companies to submit all workplace grievances to private arbitration and waive their rights both to go to court and join together in class-action lawsuits.